American people who took over the Southwest, the region
is closer to Missouri than to Kansas, which is not Southwest
in any sense but which has had a strong influence on Oklahoma.
Chihuahua is more southwestern than large parts of
Oklahoma. In _Our Southwest_, Erna Fergusson has a whole
chapter on "What is the Southwest?" She finds Fort Worth
to be in the Southwest but Dallas, thirty miles east, to be
facing north and east. The principal areas of the Southwest
are, to have done with air-minded reservations, Arizona, New
Mexico, most of Texas, some of Oklahoma, and anything
else north, south, east, or west that anybody wants to bring
in. The boundaries of cultures and rainfall never follow
survey lines. In talking about the Southwest I naturally
incline to emphasize the Texas part of it.

Life is fluid, and definitions that would apprehend it
must also be. Yet I will venture one definition--not the
only one--of an educated person. An educated person is
one who can view with interest and intelligence the
phenomena of life about him. Like people elsewhere, the people
of the Southwest find the features of the land on which they
live blank or full of pictures according to the amount of
interest and intelligence with which they view the features.
Intelligence cannot be acquired, but interest can; and data
for interest and intelligence to act upon are entirely acquirable.

"Studies perfect nature," Bacon said. "Nature follows
art" to the extent that most of us see principally what our
attention has been called to. I might never have noticed rose-
purple snow between shadows if I had not seen a picture of